Birds of America

by Mary McCarthy

  Tea-caddies, ironstone tureens, Lowestoft dishes, seashells, and (naturally) bean pots were filled with “wild material,” which, translated from Garden Club parlance, meant weeds. Among them, Peter recognized some old friends. Cat-tails from the marshes, Queen Anne’s lace, beach peas, Black-eyed Susan, Bouncing Bet. His mother said it had been like that in every house so far. He decided to start keeping a tally. According to his final count, the commonest “flower” in this unusual flower show was Queen Anne’s lace. Bouncing Bet scored second—“so versatile,” he heard a woman say. There was also a multitude of field and beach grasses unknown by name to him but which belonged, his mother said coldly, on a hay-fever chart. Here and there, combined with this wild material, were a few roses and/or blue hydrangeas, some stalks of delphinium, a gladiolus. The visitors filing through seemed lost in admiration. “Look at that, will you, sweetheart,” an earnest man in a yachting blazer said to his wife. “It shows what you can do with just one rose.”

  An exception was the contest set by their landlady: “An arrangement of red, white, and blue flowers in an old pewter container. CHAIRMAN: Mrs. Frances B. Hills.” The prize winners here had used conventional flowers, like larkspurs and petunias. His mother said this must be because few weeds came in patriotic colors. A debate was going on. Some argued that “Honorable Mention,” who had used Queen Anne’s lace, field asters, and devil’s-paint-brush (which to Peter’s eye was orange), ought to have had first prize. A man stood up for the awards. “To me, they look bright and colorful.” “Floristy,” his wife told him. And that indeed was the case. The scandal reached Peter and his mother at the diner, where they were eating their lunch. “You folks hear what happened?” said the waitress. It was all over town: the first- and second-prize winners in Mrs. Hills’s contest had been disqualified; they had bought their material from a florist in Westerly. The truck had been seen delivering.

  At tea at the house of the Garden Club president, Peter and his mother, in search of a friendly face, found the admiral chuckling to himself on the terrace overlooking the harbor. “They’ve confessed,” he said. “Been asked to resign from the Garden Club. If Frances Hills had her way, they’d be stood in the pillory. ‘Collapse of public morality.’ ” He munched at a thawed frozen sandwich from the Corner Cupboard and spat out a sliver of ice. “Seems as though they could make a sandwich at home.” “Did you see the flower-arrangements, Reb?” The admiral nodded. “Did the whole tour. Paid good money for it. Only flowers worth seeing came from the florist.” He sourly recalled the days at the War College when he had grown giant dahlias. “They’ll have instant flowers next.” “A weed is an instant flower,” Peter’s mother pointed out. The admiral chortled. “The country’s going to hell, sweetheart. Fellow came the other day, tried to sell me an atom-bomb shelter made of compressed marble dust. Claimed it was a new industry, helping unemployment in the area. The Great Society! I tell you, I’m swinging more and more to Goldwater.”

  Peter’s mother started to argue. “Goldwater is worse, Reb. Look at his foreign policy. And he runs a department store. At least Johnson taught school.” Peter took his mother’s empty teacup and glided toward the dining room. The admiral sounded like a fascist, and his mother sounded like a Communist, and they were the two people he liked in Rocky Port. Mrs. Curtis in his view was too fey to count politically. He approached the tea table, where Mrs. Hills was pouring. “Young man, why don’t you wait and let other people be served before you? This is the third time you’ve been through the line. Don’t you get enough to eat at home?” Peter replied non-violently. “It’s for my mother.”

  He went back to the terrace and reported the exchange. The admiral laughed. “Steer clear of her, son. She’s kind of inflamed today. Having that happen at her contest. Never at her best anyway in an election year.” He turned to Peter’s mother. “You know, the other night somebody took the Goldwater streamer off her car. I think she suspects young Peter here.” He winked at Peter. “Why, that’s the most unjust thing! Why should she suspect Peter?” She set her cup down, as though to take action. Peter met the admiral’s eyes, slightly hooded, like a hawk’s. The old man shook his head. He gently pulled Peter’s mother to her seat. “Let be, honey. Let’s you and I go on discussing politics. Now I voted for Adlai in ’52 and again in ’56. I never liked Ike. …” Peter wondered whether the admiral was too old to make passes. And if he made a pass, should the fair Rosamund yield if he promised to vote for Johnson?

  The next morning, before the parade, a policeman came to their door. Their landlady wanted the historical notice put back on the house front immediately, before the parade started. With so many visitors in town, interested in historic houses, Peter’s mother, she claimed, was depreciating the value of her property. “Says she gave you a written request to nail the sign up where it was more than a month ago.” Peter’s mother took a stand in the doorway. “I’m sorry, but I’ve rented this house, and there’s nothing in the lease that requires me to carry advertising on it.” The policeman rubbed his foot on the Welcome mat. “Come on, lady. Mrs. Hills has the law on her side. Selectmen say every old house in Rocky Port township has to have one of those boards.” “If she has the law on her side, let her sue me. Excuse me, officer; I’m busy.” She started to turn away; she was making seven-minute frosting for her cake for the fair.

  “Not so fast there, lady,” said the policeman. “I’m talking to you.” She pushed open the screen door impatiently and came out onto the doorstep. The policeman backed up, bumping into Peter, who had been watering the herbal geraniums in the window boxes. Some water from the watering-can spilled onto the policeman’s uniform. A little crowd was gathering under the elms and maples: tourists hung with cameras and a few paraders in period costumes with muskets. Because of the parade, the street had been cleared of motor traffic. In front of the Holy Ghost Club, the band was tuning up. “Selectmen say—” repeated the policeman in a louder voice. “Is that a town ordinance, officer?” Peter heard his own voice croak.

  Mindful of his civil-rights training, he was making a simple request for information; that was what you did when met by a sheriff and his deputies at a county line. “Pipe down, Buster,” the cop said. Behind him, Peter saw a tourist hold up a light meter. “My son asked you a question,” said his mother, as the camera clicked. “And his name is not Buster.” “That’s enough out of you too, lady.” The band struck up “Yankee Doodle.” “Come on, Missus, let’s have a little co-operation. I got a parade to handle. I give you five minutes to put that board back.”

  That was a tactical mistake, Peter estimated. His mother could not hammer the placard back with all these clowns watching her. Across the street, he observed their landlady surveying the scene from her bedroom window. “Or let Buster do it,” emended the cop. Peter looked to his mother for guidance. In his opinion, it would be wiser to comply. The cop was flustered and ignorant, probably, of the law—something he would be unwilling to betray in front of so many witnesses. You were supposed to see your opponent as a human being and avoid making him look foolish in public. “Why don’t you go in the house and talk it over, Mother? Maybe you can come to an agreement.” “I’m afraid that’s out of the question,” she said coolly. “There isn’t any board. I burned it.” Peter gulped. It was her bridges she had just burned; the sign was stored in the basement. “I used it for kindling. By mistake.” She smiled defiantly. The cop could see she was lying—she seemed to want him to. “Did you report this careless destruction of property?” “No.” “Why not?” “It slipped my mind.” The cop sighed. “Lady, I’m going to have to ask you to walk along to the police station.”

  “I’m sorry, I’m frosting a cake.” In the crowd, someone laughed. “Don’t give me that,” the cop said. “Step along now.” “Have you got a warrant?” Peter asked quietly. The cop’s eyes narrowed. “Let’s see your draft card, buddy.” Peter slowly put down the watering-can, balancing it on the window box. The cop prodded him with a finger. “Let’s see th
at draft card!” “Don’t you touch him!” his mother cried. Another policeman elbowed his way through the onlookers. “What’s going on here? Clear the street, folks. You’re holding up the parade.” Encouraged by the reinforcement, the first cop gripped Peter’s arm. “All right, you! Let’s have it!” Before he could restrain her, his mother picked up the watering-can, which was still half full, and poured the contents over the cop. “I advise you to cool off,” she said between her teeth.

  Owing to these events, they missed the parade as well as the fair on the green. They were in the village jail, waiting to be charged with disorderly conduct, resisting arrest, and assaulting a police officer. An elderly attendant locked Peter in a cell, while someone went to fetch the matron to lock up his mother. They had not been booked because there was no one to book them; the police force was busy supervising the festivities. There was no one in jail but the two of them—not even a cockroach. In the distance he heard the band. Finally it stopped and was replaced by a loud-speaker. He knew that lunch-time must have come because he was hungry—they had taken away his wristwatch when they searched him.

  The jail fare proved to be hamburgers from the Portuguese diner, with plenty of ketchup, delivered by Margery, the waitress, Peter’s old friend, who, it transpired, moonlighted as matron in the lockup. She let herself into his cell, handed him his tray, lit a cigarette, and combed out her beehive hairdo. “I remembered how you liked them—rare, and I made your mother’s rare too.” What she had not remembered was that they preferred mustard. Peter was relieved to glean that his mother had not said so. “Gee, thanks, Margery; I mean …” He hesitated, unsure of how to address her in their changed relationship.

  “Go ahead, call me Marge,” she said. “I can get you seconds, if you want.” He wondered what he should do about tipping her; they had taken away his money too. “Don’t give it a thought, Pete. It’s a pleasure. Anyway, the town pays my time here, and it makes a change. Don’t happen often that they send for me. We rarely get a woman in jail. Last one was a murderess. Police caught her, where she was hiding out in Rocky Port. She was wanted in Hartford for an axe-murder. Geez, Pete, it come as a shock to me to see your mother here. A lady like her. You never know these days, do you? Nobody told me. Just ‘You’re wanted as matron, Marge.’ I didn’t even have time to slip off my apron.”

  “Neither did my mother,” Peter remarked dryly. Margery nodded. “You don’t have to tell me. Geez, Pete, I had to search her. Right down to her panties and hose. A lady like her. Just the same as a hooker. But like I told her, the law says I have to do it. I can’t go against the law.” “You mustn’t buy that,” said Peter. “If anybody feels a law is unjust, he ought to disobey it.” “You mean like Prohibition?” Peter had not thought of the analogy. “Actually, I was thinking of segregation. Or marching without a permit. I didn’t mean it was unjust that you had to search my mother.” “I was just doing my job,” Margery retorted. “Like I told her. But, God, it broke my heart. Skin like a baby, she has. Geez, Pete, what are things coming to?”

  Peter did not know. Though he could not nurse his mother’s wrongs with the same woeful relish as the jail matron, he agreed that she did not belong in “a place like this”—as Margery kept calling it, shaking her head. In fact, his cell, which slept four, had a toilet, and a window box filled with white and purple petunias. Conditions were pretty good. Nevertheless, it shocked him to think of his mother, who was very modest, being stripped by a wardress. He asked himself what was the difference between Margery and a hospital nurse—his mother would be stripped in a hospital as a matter of course. The evident difference was that in a hospital his mother would be a private patient. What was biting Margery was that his mother was getting the common-criminal treatment, while statistically she was an uncommon criminal. It seemed to be otherwise with him. His age, he assumed, made his being in a place like this appear more natural.

  While Margery went to fetch his dessert, he pursued his thoughts. Whatever others might feel, he regarded his own presence here as wholly unnatural—fantastic. He could not believe that Peter Levi was in jail in good old Rocky Port. Down South, it would have been different: you went there knowing that you might be arrested; you went to bear witness. Just as the babbo, who had done time in Mussolini’s prisons, had felt that he “belonged” there because he opposed fascism. You belonged in a place where you had chosen to be. But this morning’s adventure had had a horrible, unreal, automated character from the outset. For one thing, it had all happened so fast, like a car accident. One minute he was peacefully watering the geraniums and the next he was aiming a feeble left at a policeman’s jaw. His reason felt aggrieved; what had happened did not make sense in the general scheme. It was like that time, last fall on the Cape, when he had swum out too far and lost his wind: the thought that he might be drowning, all alone in the unfriendly ocean, while his family was sunning on the beach, had appeared to him as a sort of gross insult—the last straw, really. He asked himself now whether this stubborn sense of personal immunity, like the sense of personal immortality, was a bourgeois trait.

  Another point was needling him. “A lady like her.” He confessed that it had gratified him to hear Margery say it. He was glad that somebody in this madhouse recognized that his mother was gently bred, a gentle person. But what would Margery say of Mrs. Hills, who was not a hooker either, if she landed in the clink? Did Margery know the difference between his mother and Mrs. Hills or was she just evincing class prejudice? In that case he ought to have corrected her instead of silently consenting. As an egalitarian, he ought to be repelled by the survival of feudal notions among the “lower orders”; yet in his heart he had been humbly thanking Margery for not confusing his mother with an axe-murderess from Hartford. This meant, he guessed, that he was uncertain of his own values and needed a friendly waitress to confirm them. But maybe in a democracy that was the way it should be; his mother was a “lady” by Margery’s consent.

  The afternoon went by. Solitary confinement, he discovered, did not promote a Socratic dialogue with yourself. You got bored. He practiced the conjugation of French irregular verbs, sang his favorite arias to himself (“Se vuol ballare, signor contino”), and endeavored to guess the time from the length of the shadows cast by the bars on his floor. He supposed he had the right to ask for a lawyer and make one telephone call but he felt no inclination to exercise those rights. Sooner or later, he and his mother would be sprung. No doubt their friends outside were working on that now. The syrup for his mother’s frosting must have boiled away on the stove. Had anybody turned off the gas?

  “So you’re in the brig, son.” Peter was dozing when the admiral was admitted to his cell. He had brought Peter’s pajamas, bathrobe, and toothbrush, and a stack of magazines. “Am I going to have to stay here all night?” Peter cried out, forgetting to think of his mother. “Isn’t anybody posting bail or anything? Listen, sir, tomorrow I have to go to my father.” The admiral soothed him. He and Mrs. Curtis had been to see a lawyer, who had called up a judge at the county seat. They could not be released on bail until they had been charged before a magistrate. He delved into his old black satchel and brought out a thermos of Martinis and some cake, wrapped in foil, from the fair. “Here’s something to brush your teeth with. You can eat the cake later.” He poured Peter a Martini into the thermos top.

  “Here’s how it is, son. The judge and the lawyer-fellow say to go slow. The lawyer’s in there now, talking to your mother. His advice is not to insist on being charged. Doesn’t do, in a little place like Rocky Port, to stand up on your hind legs and yell for your legal rights.” “Amen,” said Peter. The old man looked at him shrewdly. “From what I hear, your trouble, son, was that you thought you were down South.” “I guess that’s true.” “Down South,” said the admiral, “with all this agitation, the sheriff knows the law. All the fine print. Has to, if he’s going to use it against you. The police up here haven’t had the opportunity. Never come up against any civil-rights workers.”
Peter laughed feebly. “Still, even up here, they must know about habeas corpus,” he objected. “Sure,” said the admiral. “After twenty-four hours, the lawyer can get a writ. But it won’t come to that. Point is to give the police a chance to think it over. The chief of police won’t be happy when he finds he has a celebrity in the brig. Once your mother’s charged, she’s likely to have to stand trial. Papers will get hold of it, and the police won’t want to drop the case, because that’d make it look as if they were in the wrong. She could turn around and sue them for false arrest. None of that would do Rocky Port any good, or your mother either. When an artist gets to fighting with the police, the scuttlebutt always is they’ve been drinking. Kind of a natural conclusion, in my experience. Bottoms up, boy.” Peter downed the Martini.

  The admiral refilled his cup. “After supper, the judge is coming over for the fireworks. He’ll have a session with the chief of police. But that’ll be kind of late. Fireworks don’t start till ten o’clock.” “Fireworks?” said Peter wanly. Nobody had told him that the annual celebration ended with a fireworks display. “Looks as if you’d have to miss them. But you’ll be a free man in the morning. The judge will appreciate it if your mother sends him one of her albums. Chief of police maybe too.” “The payola,” muttered Peter.

  The admiral weighed anchor after watching Peter finish the second Martini, which he did not really want. He looked at the cartoons in the New Yorker and could not get the point of the jokes. A mood of bitter dissatisfaction took hold of him, which he declined to blame on the wormwood he had consumed. He was nauseated by society. It occurred to him that the old man had tried to get him drunk on purpose so as to keep him from insisting on his right to a trial. His mother, he assumed, was taking the lawyer’s advice, and he was angry that he had not been consulted. They ought to stand trial, he considered. The charges were true. And what was their defense? That a policeman had called him “Buster” and asked for his draft card. He laughed sullenly to himself. If there was any justice in Rocky Port, they should be lucky to get off with a suspended sentence.